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Books Quotes
"Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world."
24
"We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny of every kind."
24
"Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books."
23
"I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction."
23
"Nowadays I construct my books as if they're film scripts."
23
"I grew up on a mixed diet of mass and class, and I still read that way. I hate it when people apologize for what they read. Some bestsellers aren't exactly literary. So what? They're fun and rip-roaring, Who instituted the book police and why do we have to answer them? Grrrrr!"
23
"The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller's hole, reading a book. It was a real book - onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent."
22
"Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence."
22
"Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths... The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that... But the second kind, they show you life more like it is... The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up."
22
"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."
22
"Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies - for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry - I say to myself, "What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home."
21
"A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."
21
"I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it."
21
"There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was what I wanted. Stacks of books. Great heaps of books. Shelf after endless shelf of books."
21
"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
21
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
18
"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."
18
"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."
18
"I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple."
18
"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."
17
"Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them."
17
"A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books."
17
"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."
17
"Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens."
17
"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."
16
"The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads."
16
"Books" - Snell smiled - "are a kind of magic."
16
"A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."
15
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